UC Riverside

This project explores a feedback loop between the State, military, terrorism studies, and the literary by examining how global anglophone literature concerning the War on Terror addresses the outcomes of surveillance, detainment, imprisonment, and torture upon the lives of Muslim subjects within cosmopolitan spaces across the world. I argue that Ishtiyaq Shukri’s The Silent Minaret (2005), Tabish Khair’s The Thing About Thugs (2010), Rajia Hassib’s A Pure Heart (2019) Fatima Bhutto’s Runaways (2019) are uniquely positioned to address the worldwide economic and social realities engendered by a discourse of the imperial imagination in which religion and race are constitutive of an ever-present and ever-elusive enemy from within. Each of the texts I explore in the chapters that follow take different approaches in portraying life within a Western secular paradigm, highlighting the resistance and consequences to their protagonists as they attempt to carve out space for faith, sovereignty, and political collectivity amidst the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.